Valuing the Future: Changing Time Horizons and Policy Preferences

The short time horizons of citizens are a prominent explanation for why governments fail to tackle significant long-term public policy problems. Evidence for the influence of time horizons is mixed, complicated by the difficulty of determining how attitudes would differ if individuals were more concerned about the future. This paper approaches the challenge by leveraging a personal experience that leads people to place more value on the future: parenthood. The analysis compares new parents with otherwise similar individuals using a matched difference-in-differences design with a three-wave panel. The results show that parenthood increases support for stopping climate change. Falsification tests and two survey experiments suggest that longer time horizons explain part of this shift in support. Not only are scholars right to emphasize the role of individual time horizons, but changing valuations of the future offer a new way to understand how policy preferences evolve.